Social Networking Sites

            Facebook is the main social networking site that I have been using for about the past 4 years.  From my experience using MySpace a couple of years back, I like Facebook a lot better.  I think overall Facebook does a better job of maintaining privacy than MySpace does.  Whereas on MySpace it felt like anyone could create a profile and impersonate another person, Facebook seems to have less of that.  They definitely have a better system for verifying that you actually are who you say you are.  Moving from MySpace to Facebook felt like a big upgrade. 

            I think Facebook is more sophisticated and makes better use of social networking.  It’s more sophisticated because instead of having crazy color schemes and images/music/video playing in the background it just has the same basic profile for everyone.  Therefore navigating everyone’s profile is the same, instead of having different setups on every MySpace you visit.  The social networking aspect is better than MySpace’s because in your News Feed you can see what everyone else is writing, or posting, or playing and etc.  This links everyone because instead of going around browsing everyone’s profile, you get the updates right on your homepage.  I think this is a major item that MySpace doesn’t have (or at least it didn’t have it back when I was using it).   

            It seems to me that Twitter is basically one big Facebook where the only thing you can do is update your status.  I’ve never had one until recently (I made one earlier today) so I’m still trying to figure out what the site is all about.  I know that a lot of actors, athletes, and other famous people use twitter to connect with their fans.  I know from hearing on the news that some athletes have been reprimanded by their teams for tweeting during games.  I think in this case it just serves as a distraction from what they should be doing which is concentrating on the game.  The same goes for everyone else is general.  From what I have seen on Twitter, people will post just about anything that they’re doing or thinking.  Personally I don’t see the point in posting stuff on Twitter, Facebook, etc. such as “taking a shower” or “going to sleep.”  I think posts like this fall under the category of too much information.         

            Having just made a Friendster account today, I’m not really familiar with this website either.  Based on my early use of it, it seems like it would be useful to an older crowd of people mainly because you add friends via e-mail address.  This might be useful for business purposes or if you communicate heavily with your friends via e-mail, but personally speaking, I don’t even know my friends’ e-mail addresses.  Also, this website seems very similar to Facebook.  You can add pictures, update what you’re currently doing, play games, connect with friends, etc.